The present period of history has been termed by many the information age. Every business and nearly every field of human activity is involved with references, instructions, briefs, periodicals, articles, books, electronic files, video files, and the like. In the area of electronic files, the term multimedia has been applied to mean systems capable of dealing with and displaying/playing electronic files of many sorts. It is clear that an enormous amount of human effort goes into preparing all of these files and documents, and an equally enormous amount of electronic storage has to be allocated to store vast quantities of data.
There exist today many computer applications (programs) designed to work with very large data bases, and in many instances such programs are required to search such data bases for particular and specific pieces of information. As data bases become larger and larger with the many new and sophisticated kinds of electronic files and the proliferation of digitized information in general, and because a system CPU must perform repetitive tasks in searching many data structures in a system, such searching can be a major consumer of system resources.
What is needed as data bases become larger is an apparatus and system that allows a search to be conducted in memory structures while the managing CPU is left free to perform other tasks in parallel with many or all of the search functions.